Divinely Evil

A drawing room with salmon-coloured walls, tapestries, busts, house plants, a dressmaker’s dummy. In a velvet armchair with gold trim sits Wilma Azevedo, 74, Brazil’s “queen of sadomasochistic literature”. She is asked by the director to tell the story of her life, which quickly branches out into a series of detailed erotic anecdotes involving green bananas, dildos made of sandpaper and over-stimulated nerves. In her heyday, she received 300 love letters a month, an incredible success story. Sometimes her memory fails her, at which point the young actress in the background, who is supposed to play her in an upcoming film, comes to her aid.